


Wit's End

by Irmolin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Drug Abuse, F/F, F/M, I don't know a lot about this stuff, Rose and Terezi meet in rehab, the gamrezi is more of a back drop for the roserezi btw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 13:00:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17386904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irmolin/pseuds/Irmolin
Summary: In between ruined careers, failed relationships, substance abuse and dead relatives, Rose and Terezi tumble into each other's lives and try to come to terms with the prospect of Getting Better. Friends and family watch in bewildered horror and amusement.





	Wit's End

It’s Friday night, but you don’t really care. Since you lost your job the passing of time has been more of an afterthought, and the days of the week intertwine the way they do in summer. Turns out your counseling didn’t improve the more inebriated you were, and the advise you gave your client was perceived as “offensive”, “inappropriate” and “not suitable to tell a victim of traumatic experiences”. Well, that girl had been a fucking wreck, and you had done her a favor by telling it to her straight up. You sip your lukewarm beer, angrily, and feeling unappreciated. This wasn’t the first time you’d been fired, though the circumstances were always different, like that one time when you had been too preoccupied with attempting to summon Satan in your kitchen to remember to go to work, or when you had worked at a pet store and gotten caught stealing several kittens (this had – to your profound satisfaction – gone unnoticed for weeks), or when you didn’t come to work for a month because you spent the days sleeping, trying to figure out a particularly strange dream you kept having, that you were sure carried some secret message about the purpose of your existence and the general meaning of life. Your favorite story though, was when you were seventeen and schemed to get yourself fired in a show of sympathy for your unemployed mother. That had been brilliant. Yes, that had burned. Smiling fondly at the memory, you gulp down the last of your beer. (Though you dislike it this is the fifth can of it you’ve drunk today). You like to think that even getting fired can be a form of self-expression, and doing it differently every time is an art. Some people just do it so disgracefully. 

Dave has been trying to reach you all day. You have 17 missed calls from him, poor boy, and so many texts (rose, rose, please just answer jesus fucking christ, rose just pick up your goddamn phone) that you have to scroll up and load older messages twice to get to the first ones from this morning. It’s not that you don’t want to talk to him, you’d love to, it’s just that he wouldn’t want to talk to you if he knew how drunk you are. But of course he doesn’t know that. You want to tell him that since it’s Friday night he should go out and have some fun, and stop worrying about his disaster of a sister for once, because really, it’s embarrassing. He’s so lame. 

You, on the other hand, are currently fucking smashing. What’s cooler than being cool? Being Rose Lalonde. Alright, alright, alright, alright. The street is buzzing, the dizziness of city life has got you high and exited, everywhere around you people are laughing and talking loudly, twirling round each other like yarn spun by knitting needles. As you try to work yourself through the tight crowd someone prods your arm with a warm, sticky hand and you turn to look up into a face that gleams with perspiration. The owner of this (frankly rather appalling) face is saying something you can’t quite make out over the music and honestly don’t care to hear. To be honest it wasn’t your intention to get caught up with all these people, since you have a date with you typewriter tonight and no time to stand around and talk to strangers. You try to articulate this to the man in front of you but you aren’t very successful. Now he’s touching you and leaning in to fill your face up with his hot, booze-smelling breath, a heavy, unpleasant odor that reminds you of goodnight-kisses. 

“You here alone?” he asks, wiping the sweat off of his palm on you in a lazy motion. The night-air is cool on your skin after his fingers run along up and down your arm. 

“I’m not staying long”, you tell him, and you hope this is true, but at the same time the warmth radiating from his body draws you in with magnetic force and makes your head feel light and fuzzy. If only you could call Dave and make him come and pick you up. Unfortunately the thought of the look on his face if he saw you like this makes your heart sink with a shame that kind of completely maims your courage to contact him. Dave is an amateur film-critic, scriptwriter, musician and comedian, who’s somehow managed to convince everyone that he is not an amateur. But he’s never been able to fool you. The two of you had quite the unusual upbringing; you spent the winters in the cold of upstate New York with your mother while he stayed in your father’s high-rise apartment in Houston, being separated for most of the year for reasons even your parents don’t seem to know. Only getting together on Christmas by Rainbow Falls and over summer (different places every year), the times when your whole family was gathered were always strange and dreamlike, like a postcard sent from someone else’s life. You slept in the same room as your brother, and stayed up late every night talking and giggling and telling ghost-stories because you never grew tired of the other, still bubbling with the excitement that had been swelling inside of you ever since you last parted. It was like the first day of school after summer vacation when you had too much to say to your friends to get anything coherent out. Dave spoke very little to your father during these get-togethers and you avoided your mother as much as possible, you were both fonder of the parent you didn’t live with. But maybe that’s the way it would have been no matter how you twisted and turned the situation. 

The drunk man is still trying to chat you up and you’re vaguely aware that your mouth has been running though you have no idea what’s been coming out of it. Overhead the sky has gone dark, a street light flickers like a firefly in the corner of your eye and the music from inside is beginning to make your head hurt. In your head you go through your contact list and try to find someone else to call, someone who isn’t Dave, someone who won’t look at you with heartbroken disappointment, who won’t try to deep-talk you out of the mess you’ve made, who won’t make you ache with guilt, in conclusion; someone you don’t care that much about. Two large hands wrap around your waist and pull you close to the stranger’s warm, moist torso. He whispers something in your ear and his breath, wet like a dog’s, condensates on the bared skin of your throat. Okay, that’s enough. 

You push free from his grip and take a step back with what you hope is a swift motion. You are displeased with the wave of cold that washes over you and remember regretfully how you left your jacked thrown over the back of a chair before you left the house. How you hate March. 

“Thank you, I’ll be taking my leave now”, you say in the general direction of the man, giving him a tight, black-lipped little smile. He frowns and protests, the way they do, but you’ve made up your mind now and you want to get home. When you break out of the crowd the stillness of night swallows you immediately with its tranquil darkness and chilly air. You shudder – your legs and shoulders are bare and the thin fabric of your black dress doesn’t provide much cover or warmth – and start down the street. Even though you don’t regret what you said to your client last week, you must admit to mourning the loss of your job. It was always your dream as a child to become a therapist; you used to sit Dave down in the big ghost-white armchair (the naked corpse of an obese old man) and get him to tell you about his dreams and nightmares. He wasn’t very cooperative, and when he wasn’t around Jaspers the cat took his place. Though you couldn’t write, a notebook was always propped up on one knee and you scribbled in it from time to time with a purple crayon while nodding thoughtfully at Jaspers’ silence. You’ve forgotten most of what he told you. 

“Rosebud, why, you must tell me all about it”, your mother would say, her voice swimming; husky with alcohol. “That kitty’s up to something and I know it”. It was stupid how she tried to play along and you remember how your small hands had clutched the notebook angrily. 

“It’s confidential, mother, surely you know that”. 

In the blackness of the present you recall how white your world had been living in that house. White walls, white floor, white furniture, white clothes, hair, skin. As though a pale mist lay over it all, a colorless world as bleak as maggots. The one room filled with black and bottle green and burgundy and peach pink was where all the booze was. Outside loomed the forest, huge and alive, and lying awake at night you could hear it breathing through the walls, heavy pine and spruce and the quiet movement in between. Sometimes you knelt upon your cold mattress and peered out through your window at it, into it, and the black mass beckoned you to wander into its arms. Your heart beat steadily. The dark didn’t – and doesn’t – scare you, it’s always been the light that does, that awful stark white that filled up your vision everywhere you looked with it’s merciless stare. You close your eyes against the night for a second and let the cool wind kiss your face. If you think about it hard enough, you could be back in Rainbow Falls, walking home from the bus stop off the side of the road with the solid walls of the backwoods rising high on either side of you and the birds calling out sharply above you in the air. Of course the distant throbbing of a bass drop and people screaming and hollering down the street kind of ruins it. Damn young people. 

Your phone buzzes in your purse but there’s no need to check the caller ID. It’s kind of sad how the only man who ever calls you is your brother and for a moment you consider tweeting about this, before quickly regaining your self-respect and also realizing that Dave has twitter. It’s only a matter of time before he starts employing new methods of reaching you, once he went so far as to send you a pigeon with a note tied to it’s claw that read “if this bird aint enough to persuade you to start talking to me again then I’ve got no other choice than to pull out my fat book of shakespeare and start dropping those sick rhymes on your ass” and some more that you don’t remember, but you still have the letter tucked in between the pages of a dusty copy of Absalom, Absalom! as a bookmark. That boy is remarkably inventive. The vibrations against your hip are persistent and continue on and on as you walk away from the liveliness of the city. Somehow, there’s a small comfort in that. 

Dave is still trying to persuade you to move into his messy cramped apartment. He always says; “We would finally live under the same roof, Rose, and then we can pretend we had a normal childhood and say shit like oh brother mine, pass me the sugar, pass me the milk, then let’s built a pillow fort and watch shitty cartoons, just like when we were kids”. But the phrase “just like when we were kids” doesn’t suggest any carefree sweetness or fluffy feelings of warmth and love to you, and you know it doesn’t to your brother either. It would rattle you both to share a home with someone; neither of you ever really did, so you’re used to being alone. It’s bewildering to think living together with another person doesn’t have to include mind-games or neglect or violence, it doesn’t have to include wine-stains on your tees that won’t wash out or a finger in each ear trying to block our the sound of hurling in the bathroom at 2 am, and it never will include that for Dave so long as you stay away from him. Your phone stops vibrating and you feel almost as if you had snapped at him. Sorry, Dave. 

Maybe you are pretty drunk. When not surrounded by people equally sloshed, you suddenly feel your own intoxication much more keenly. You’re acutely aware of the contrast between your mind and body (light, mushy, feeling as if in a rocking-chair) and the street you’re walking down (dark, dead). At least you don’t feel wobbly or anything. And at least… your vision suffices… though what’s that light thrown past you? Oh never mind, it’s just a car. For a moment you forgot you were on a trafficked street and thought your eyes had begun deceiving you, but as it turns out logic is totally still a thing that you have a grasp of and which collaborates with your senses. In your drunken state of self-satisfaction with your impeccably accurate sight you wave an unsteady hand at the man stepping out of the car that just pulled over beside you. 

It’s Dave. 

Fuck. 

He grabs a hold of you just as your knees buckle and maybe you weren’t as steady as you imagined because his upright body seems leaning in a wildly gravity-defying angle while the rest of the world topples over along with him, and your head spins, and your stomach drops. He’s speaking to you with his voice that you really, really, really didn’t want to have to hear tonight, because it’s your favorite voice in the whole world, and how can you stand that?


End file.
